TY Mr Mosler for gracing our forum with your presence. Had I known you would be reading here I would have been way for polite in dealing with your theory, even though I would still disagree. So please do not take anything personally.
Oddly enough, I wrote a post about the 7 Deadly Frauds a few months ago. It’s here: https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/the-seven-deadly-innocent-frauds-of-economic-policy/12837 The main refutation is that you seem to be ignoring the fact that printing money raises prices, aka inflation and hyperinflation.
I don’t think anyone here is taking a stance because they like or dislike your description of what happens to tax money. Rather it is a question of agreeing or disagreeing.
You wrote:
What is your source for such a seemingly wild claim? have a look at this, from Wikipedia:
One need only visit cbo.gov, the website of the Congressional Budget Office, and see that virtually every page talks about how much money they collected in taxes, and of course that they need more in order to be able to spend. Here’s a snippet from http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=1769
Revenues through December totaled about $531 billion, $43 billion more than in the same period last year. Most of that net increase stems from higher withholding of individual income tax and social insurance payroll taxes, which rose by $33 billion (or 8 percent) in the first quarter because of strengthening economic conditions. Revenues also increased because individual tax refunds were lower than the abnormally high amounts for the same period a year before.
Receipts from corporate income taxes, net of refunds, were also higher—by $2 billion (or 5 percent)—than in the same period a year before, almost entirely because of estimated payments made in December 2010. Many observers had expected a decline in December because legislation enacted in September extended businesses’ ability to immediately deduct 50 percent of their 2010 investments in business equipment.
Note what they call the tax money. REVENUES.
from wikipedia:
In business, revenue is income that a company receives from its normal business activities…In general usage, revenue is income received by an organization in the form of cash or cash equivalents.
from investopedia:
In the case of government, revenue is the money received from taxation, fees, fines, inter-governmental grants or transfers, securities sales, mineral rights and resource rights, as well as any sales that are made.
So the govt, over at cbo.gov, is saying it gets revenue from taxes. Meaning money. But according to you, they just take taxes from us, but don’t get any themselves. Where did you get such an idea? What is your evidence?
You also wrote:
First of all, this has been refuted in the above. But more importantly, there is a deeper problem here.
This is a good example of what I claimed earlier, that MMT seems to confuse money and that which money can buy. When the govt spend, it ceratinly “uses up” resources. For example, when it spends money to buy fuel for Michelle’s trips, that takes away fuel that we could have been using.